Frank N. Magid Associates, LLC., a research-based strategic consulting firm, recently released the results of an interesting survey it conducted. It was studying how many gamers were out there – at least in the United States – and what were the preferred methods of gaming. The sample size might be a bit small at 2540 people but, if the trend hold true, it holds some pretty interesting possibilities for the games in the coming year.

First and foremost, according to the study, more than half of America happens do play video games. In fact, according to the study, it’s now around 64 percent of Americans.

That holds some pretty interesting political implications politically, assuming the trend holds true. After all, the repeated attempts of legislation to try to control video games in the United States would end up being against the interests of the majority of Americans. But that’s not the most interesting thing about the study’s result. The debate of whether or not traditional consoles and handhelds were on their way due to mobile and social gaming and digital distribution now has a possible answer.

Admittedly, I might’ve been wrong about mobile gaming not killing the handheld console market, as the handheld market has the lowest percentage of players, time and money spent. According to the survey, only 24 percent of Americans are traditional handheld gamers who play handheld games at least once a week. This news isn’t that great for Nintendo or Sony, unless they figure out a way to bridge that gap to bring back the people lost to tablet/smartphone/social gaming. 44 percent of Americans are mobile gamers playing games on tablets or smartphones for the same amount of time. 37 percent are social. However, according to the study, I was right about the traditional home console not being dead yet.

50 percent of surveyed gamers reported playing console games at least at the same frequency as the other demographics, though they also tended to play longer durations in each sitting. For example, according to the study, console gamers tended to play 7.2 hours of weekly play as opposed to the social gamers 6.7 hours of weekly play. That being said, Magid Associates found that “The console is still king: Console gaming has more players, money, and time spent than any other platforms.” With more people also becoming aware of DLC for the console market, that number could very well increase. This is very good news for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.